Gene editing is in the news a lot these days, but what is it exactly? Gene editing is the process of making precise and permanent changes to living things at the level of DNA, or more specifically, to the four molecular building blocks of DNA.

Though there are multiple ways to perform targeted gene editing, the most commonly discussed method these days is CRISPR/Cas9.

Watch this episode of Tech-x-planations to learn how CRISPR/Cas9 works.

Ever wished you could be in two places at the same time? The XPRIZE Foundation wants to make that a reality with a $10 million competition to build robot avatars that can be controlled from at least 100 kilometers away.

The competition was announced by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis at the SXSW conference in Austin last week, with an ambitious timeline of awarding the grand prize by October 2021. Teams have until October 31st to sign up, and they need to submit detailed plans to a panel of judges by the end of next January.

The prize, sponsored by Japanese airline ANA, has given contestants little guidance on how they expect them to solve the challenge other than saying their solutions need to let users see, hear, feel, and interact with the robot’s environment as well as the people in it.

XPRIZE has also not revealed details of what kind of tasks the robots will be expected to complete, though they’ve said tasks will range from “simple” to “complex,” and it should be possible for an untrained operator to use them.

If any of the teams succeed, the technology could have myriad applications, from letting emergency responders enter areas too hazardous for humans to helping people care for relatives who live far away or even just allowing tourists to visit other parts of the world without the jet lag.

“Our ability to physically experience another geographic location, or to provide on-the-ground assistance where needed, is limited by cost and the simple availability of time,” Diamandis said in a statement.

“The ANA Avatar XPRIZE can enable creation of an audacious alternative that could bypass these limitations, allowing us to more rapidly and efficiently distribute skill and hands-on expertise to distant geographic locations where they are needed, bridging the gap between distance, time, and cultures,” he added.

Interestingly, the technology may help bypass an enduring hand break on the widespread use of robotics: autonomy. By having a human in the loop, you don’t need nearly as much artificial intelligence analyzing sensory input and making decisions.

Robotics software is doing a lot more than just high-level planning and strategizing, though. While a human moves their limbs instinctively without consciously thinking about which muscles to activate, controlling and coordinating a robot’s components requires sophisticated algorithms.

There’s also the issue of powering these devices. You may have noticed that in a lot of the slick web videos of humanoid robots doing cool things, the machine is attached to the roof by a large cable. That’s because they suck up huge amounts of power.

Possibly the most advanced humanoid robot—Boston Dynamics’ Atlas—has a battery, but it can only run for about an hour. That might be fine for some applications, but you don’t want it running out of juice halfway through rescuing someone from a mine shaft.

When it comes to the link between the robot and its human user, some of the technology is probably not that much of a stretch. Virtual reality headsets can create immersive audio-visual environments, and a number of companies are working on advanced haptic suits that will let people “feel” virtual environments.

Motion tracking technology may be more complicated. While even consumer-grade devices can track peoples’ movements with high accuracy, you will probably need to don something more like an exoskeleton that can both pick up motion and provide mechanical resistance, so that when the robot bumps into an immovable object, the user stops dead too.

How hard all of this will be is also dependent on how the competition ultimately defines subjective terms like “feel” and “interact.” Will the user need to be able to feel a gentle breeze on the robot’s cheek or be able to paint a watercolor? Or will simply having the ability to distinguish a hard object from a soft one or shake someone’s hand be enough?

Whatever the fidelity they decide on, the approach will require huge amounts of sensory and control data to be transmitted over large distances, most likely wirelessly, in a way that’s fast and reliable enough that there’s no lag or interruptions. Fortunately 5G is launching this year, with a speed of 10 gigabits per second and very low latency, so this problem should be solved by 2021.

And it’s worth remembering there have already been some tentative attempts at building robotic avatars. Telepresence robots have solved the seeing, hearing, and some of the interacting problems, and MIT has already used virtual reality to control robots to carry out complex manipulation tasks.

South Korean company Hankook Mirae Technology has also unveiled a 13-foot-tall robotic suit straight out of a sci-fi movie that appears to have made some headway with the motion tracking problem, albeit with a human inside the robot. Toyota’s T-HR3 does the same, but with the human controlling the robot from a “Master Maneuvering System” that marries motion tracking with VR.

Combining all of these capabilities into a single machine will certainly prove challenging. But if one of the teams pulls it off, you may be able to tick off trips to the Seven Wonders of the World without ever leaving your house.

Ask any neuroscientist to draw you a neuron, and it’ll probably look something like a star with two tails: one stubby with extensive tree-like branches, the other willowy, lengthy and dotted with spindly spikes.

While a decent abstraction, this cartoonish image hides the uncomfortable truth that scientists still don’t know much about what many neurons actually look like, not to mention the extent of their connections.

But without untangling the jumbled mess of neural wires that zigzag across the brain, scientists are stumped in trying to answer one of the most fundamental mysteries of the brain: how individual neuronal threads carry and assemble information, which forms the basis of our thoughts, memories, consciousness, and self.

What if there was a way to virtually trace and explore the brain’s serpentine fibers, much like the way Google Maps allows us to navigate the concrete tangles of our cities’ highways?

Thanks to an interdisciplinary team at Janelia Research Campus, we’re on our way. Meet MouseLight, the most extensive map of the mouse brain ever attempted. The ongoing project has an ambitious goal: reconstructing thousands—if not more—of the mouse’s 70 million neurons into a 3D map. (You can play with it here!)

With map in hand, neuroscientists around the world can begin to answer how neural circuits are organized in the brain, and how information flows from one neuron to another across brain regions and hemispheres.

The first release, presented Monday at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference in Washington, DC, contains information about the shape and sizes of 300 neurons.

And that’s just the beginning.

“MouseLight’s new dataset is the largest of its kind,” says Dr. Wyatt Korff, director of project teams. “It’s going to change the textbook view of neurons.”

MICrONS, for example, is focused on dissecting a cubic millimeter of the mouse visual processing center. In contrast, MouseLight involves tracing individual neurons across the entire brain.

And while connectomics outlines the major connections between brain regions, the birds-eye view entirely misses the intricacies of each individual neuron. This is where MouseLight steps in.

Slice and Dice

With a width only a fraction of a human hair, neuron projections are hard to capture in their native state. Tug or squeeze the brain too hard, and the long, delicate branches distort or even shred into bits.

In fact, previous attempts at trying to reconstruct neurons at this level of detail topped out at just a dozen, stymied by technological hiccups and sky-high costs.

A few years ago, the MouseLight team set out to automate the entire process, with a few time-saving tweaks. Here’s how it works.

After injecting a mouse with a virus that causes a handful of neurons to produce a green-glowing protein, the team treated the brain with a sugar alcohol solution. This step “clears” the brain, transforming the beige-colored organ to translucent, making it easier for light to penetrate and boosting the signal-to-background noise ratio. The brain is then glued onto a small pedestal and ready for imaging.

Building upon an established method called “two-photon microscopy,” the team then tweaked several parameters to reduce imaging time from days (or weeks) down to a fraction of that. Endearingly known as “2P” by the experts, this type of laser microscope zaps the tissue with just enough photos to light up a single plane without damaging the tissue—sharper plane, better focus, crisper image.

After taking an image, the setup activates its vibrating razor and shaves off the imaged section of the brain—a waspy slice about 200 micrometers thick. The process is repeated until the whole brain is imaged.

The resulting images strikingly highlight every crook and cranny of a neuronal branch, popping out against a pitch-black background. But pretty pictures come at a hefty data cost: each image takes up a whopping 20 terabytes of data—roughly the storage space of 4,000 DVDs, or 10,000 hours of movies.

Stitching individual images back into 3D is an image-processing nightmare. The MouseLight team used a combination of computational power and human prowess to complete this final step.

The reconstructed images are handed off to a mighty team of seven trained neuron trackers. With the help of tracing algorithms developed in-house and a keen eye, each member can track roughly a neuron a day—significantly less time than the week or so previously needed.

A Numbers Game

Even with just 300 fully reconstructed neurons, MouseLight has already revealed new secrets of the brain.

While it’s widely accepted that axons, the neurons’ outgoing projection, can span the entire length of the brain, these extra-long connections were considered relatively rare. (In fact, one previously discovered “giant neuron” was thought to link to consciousness because of its expansive connections).

Images captured from two-photon microscopy show an axon and dendrites protruding from a neuron’s cell body (sphere in center). Image Credit: Janelia Research Center, MouseLight project team

MouseLight blows that theory out of the water.

The data clearly shows that “giant neurons” are far more common than previously thought. For example, four neurons normally associated with taste had wiry branches that stretched all the way into brain areas that control movement and process touch.

“We knew that different regions of the brain talked to each other, but seeing it in 3D is different,” says Dr. Eve Marder at Brandeis University.

“The results are so stunning because they give you a really clear view of how the whole brain is connected.”

With a tested and true system in place, the team is now aiming to add 700 neurons to their collection within a year.

But appearance is only part of the story.

We can’t tell everything about a person simply by how they look. Neurons are the same: scientists can only infer so much about a neuron’s function by looking at their shape and positions. The team also hopes to profile the gene expression patterns of each neuron, which could provide more hints to their roles in the brain.

MouseLight essentially dissects the neural infrastructure that allows information traffic to flow through the brain. These anatomical highways are just the foundation. Just like Google Maps, roads form only the critical first layer of the map. Street view, traffic information and other add-ons come later for a complete look at cities in flux.

No doubt these applications of cutting-edge tech will continue to push the needle on progress in medicine, diagnosis, and treatment. But what if some of the healthcare hacks we need most aren’t high-tech at all?

According to Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, this is exactly the case. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine last week, Sanghavi told the audience, “We often think in extremely complex ways, but I think a lot of the improvements in health at scale can be done in an analog way.”

Sanghavi is the chief medical officer and senior vice president of translation at OptumLabs, and was previously director of preventive and population health at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, where he oversaw the development of large pilot programs aimed at improving healthcare costs and quality.

“How can we improve health at scale, not for only a small number of people, but for entire populations?” Sanghavi asked. With programs that benefit a small group of people, he explained, what tends to happen is that the average health of a population improves, but the disparities across the group worsen.

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“My mantra became, ‘The denominator is everybody,’” he said. He shared details of some low-tech but crucial fixes he believes could vastly benefit the US healthcare system.

1. Regulatory Hacking

Healthcare regulations are ultimately what drive many aspects of patient care, for better or worse. Worse because the mind-boggling complexity of regulations (exhibit A: the Affordable Care Act is reportedly about 20,000 pages long) can make it hard for people to get the care they need at a cost they can afford, but better because, as Sanghavi explained, tweaking these regulations in the right way can result in across-the-board improvements in a given population’s health.

An adjustment to Medicare hospitalization rules makes for a relevant example. The code was updated to state that if people who left the hospital were re-admitted within 30 days, that hospital had to pay a penalty. The result was hospitals taking more care to ensure patients were released not only in good health, but also with a solid understanding of what they had to do to take care of themselves going forward. “Here, arguably the writing of a few lines of regulatory code resulted in a remarkable decrease in 30-day re-admissions, and the savings of several billion dollars,” Sanghavi said.

2. Long-Term Focus

It’s easy to focus on healthcare hacks that have immediate, visible results—but what about fixes whose benefits take years to manifest? How can we motivate hospitals, regulators, and doctors to take action when they know they won’t see changes anytime soon?

“I call this the reality TV problem,” Sanghavi said. “Reality shows don’t really care about who’s the most talented recording artist—they care about getting the most viewers. That is exactly how we think about health care.”

Sanghavi’s team wanted to address this problem for heart attacks. They found they could reliably determine someone’s 10-year risk of having a heart attack based on a simple risk profile. Rather than monitoring patients’ cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, and other individual factors, the team took the average 10-year risk across entire provider panels, then made providers responsible for controlling those populations.

“Every percentage point you lower that risk, by hook or by crook, you get some people to stop smoking, you get some people on cholesterol medication. It’s patient-centered decision-making, and the provider then makes money. This is the world’s first predictive analytic model, at scale, that’s actually being paid for at scale,” he said.

3. Aligned Incentives

If hospitals are held accountable for the health of the communities they’re based in, those hospitals need to have the right incentives to follow through. “Hospitals have to spend money on community benefit, but linking that benefit to a meaningful population health metric can catalyze significant improvements,” Sanghavi said.

He used smoking cessation as an example. His team designed a program where hospitals were given a score (determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) based on the smoking rate in the counties where they’re located, then given monetary incentives to improve their score. Improving their score, in turn, resulted in better health for their communities, which meant fewer patients to treat for smoking-related health problems.

4. Social Determinants of Health

Social determinants of health include factors like housing, income, family, and food security. The answer to getting people to pay attention to these factors at scale, and creating aligned incentives, Sanghavi said, is “Very simple. We just have to measure it to start with, and measure it universally.”

His team was behind a $157 million pilot program called Accountable Health Communities that went live this year. The program requires all Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries get screened for various social determinants of health. With all that data being collected, analysts can pinpoint local trends, then target funds to address the underlying problem, whether it’s job training, drug use, or nutritional education. “You’re then free to invest the dollars where they’re needed…this is how we can improve health at scale, with very simple changes in the incentive structures that are created,” he said.

5. ‘Securitizing’ Public Health

Sanghavi’s final point tied back to his discussion of aligning incentives. As misguided as it may seem, the reality is that financial incentives can make a huge difference in healthcare outcomes, from both a patient and a provider perspective.

Sanghavi’s team did an experiment in which they created outcome benchmarks for three major health problems that exist across geographically diverse areas: smoking, adolescent pregnancy, and binge drinking. The team proposed measuring the baseline of these issues then creating what they called a social impact bond. If communities were able to lower their frequency of these conditions by a given percent within a stated period of time, they’d get paid for it.

“What that did was essentially say, ‘you have a buyer for this outcome if you can achieve it,’” Sanghavi said. “And you can try to get there in any way you like.” The program is currently in CMS clearance.

AI and Robots Not Required

Using robots to perform surgery and artificial intelligence to diagnose disease will undoubtedly benefit doctors and patients around the US and the world. But Sanghavi’s talk made it clear that our healthcare system needs much more than this, and that improving population health on a large scale is really a low-tech project—one involving more regulatory and financial innovation than technological innovation.

“The things that get measured are the things that get changed,” he said. “If we choose the right outcomes to predict long-term benefit, and we pay for those outcomes, that’s the way to make progress.”

Arthur C. Clarke, a British science fiction writer, is well known for once writing, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Consumer virtual reality is going through a rough patch as high expectations and hype have deflated somewhat, but when VR does work, it can feel a bit like magic.

At Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine Summit this week, the audience learned about fascinating virtual reality applications within a mix of medical contexts.

Here’s a look at two we found particularly interesting.

Surgical Training in Virtual Reality

Shafi Ahmed, co-founder of Virtual Medics and Medical Realities, spoke again this year at Exponential Medicine. Last year we wrote about Ahmed’s efforts to solve the huge global shortage of trained surgeons:

“According to the Lancet commission on global surgery, the surgical workforce would have to double to meet the needs of basic surgical care for the developing world by 2030. Dr. Ahmed imagines being able to train thousands of surgeons simultaneously in virtual reality.”

With this in mind, Ahmed made a splash back in 2014 when he reached 14,000 surgeons across 100 different countries by using Google Glass to stream a surgical training session. In 2016, Ahmed took this a step further by live-streaming a cancer surgery in virtual reality that was shot in 360-degree video while he removed a colon tumor from a patient.

Ahmed’s philosophy is clear. He says, “Forget one-to-one. My idea is one to many. I want to share knowledge with the masses.” To achieve this, his company Medical Realities is building the world’s first interactive VR training module for surgeons. After these successes, Ahmed began searching for other low-cost, high-tech platforms to leverage for surgical training. He landed on social media.

Last year, Ahmed used Snapchat glasses to record an operation in ten-second clips that were uploaded to his Snapchat story. It was a huge success, receiving two million views and 100,000 YouTube downloads. Ahmed said, “It’s incredible reach, and it’s free. That’s the kind of world we live in.” Ahmed also streamed Twitter’s first live operation.

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Now, Ahmed is working with virtual reality company Thrive to push the boundaries of remote collaboration in virtual reality. The platform enables doctors to remotely log into a shared virtual office to discuss patient cases. Ahmed showed an example of four doctors from four different locations who logged into a virtual office together to discuss a patient’s case in real time. Inside the virtual office the doctors were even able to access and review patients’ medical files.

Virtual Reality for Therapeutics

Brennan Spiegel, a pioneer of VR in healthcare at Cedars-Sinai, has witnessed firsthand the positive impact of using virtual reality with patients for therapeutic treatment. At Cedars-Sinai, Spiegel leads a team that studies how technologies like smartphone apps, VR, wearable biosensors, and social media can improve health outcomes.

Some of the findings have been incredible.

Spiegel told the story of a young adult suffering from severe Crohn’s disease, which forced him to spend 100 days of the last year in the hospital. The most healing environment he can think of, however, is his grandmother’s living room. Spiegel’s team was able to place a Samsung 360 camera in the grandmother’s living room then give the patient a VR headset to virtually transport him there. The experience nearly brought him to tears and is a perfect example of how VR can make patients in hospital treatment more comfortable.

Spiegel’s team also had success using VR to help men with high blood pressure. Inside of the VR program, users are transported into a kitchen and educated on which types of food contain sodium. The program then brings users inside a human body, where they can see the targeted impact of the sodium intake.

Spiegel’s dream is to see a VR pharmacy where the right treatment experience is mapped to the right patient.

Virtual and augmented reality are creating novel methods in health care for treatment, training, and doctor collaboration. These are just a few examples of practical uses showing VR’s potential applied to medicine. In many ways, however, this is only the beginning of what’s to come as VR and AR mature.

Technology doesn’t always need to feel like magic, but when it can for a struggling patient or doctor seeking access to training, that’s an extraordinary thing for health care.

To Bob Hariri, the body is a machine. Hariri is a surgeon, entrepreneur, and biomedical scientist. But perhaps it’s his time flying jets that most strongly lends itself to such thinking.

“I’ve been flying longer than anything I’ve done in my life,” Hariri said in an interview with Peter Diamandis this week at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine in San Diego.

“You know why aviation is so incredibly safe? Because the machine, the airplane—and a human being is a machine–that airplane undergoes a continuous process of renovation and repair.”

Pilots take care of their planes by replacing parts before they wear out, Hariri said. Medicine, on the other hand, is reactive. Nothing gets replaced until it’s already broken. Hariri got into regenerative medicine and founded Celgene Cellular Therapeutics to help remedy this situation.

Regenerative medicine targets the body’s most basic parts: its trillions of specialized cells. Though medicine is reactive, the body itself is a bit like a jet, one that makes new parts to replace old ones on the fly. The vast majority of cells in the body are no more than two years old, Hariri said. (Although, the time it takes new cells to replace old cells varies by type.)

Our regenerative capability is greatest before we’re born. In an onstage interview, Hariri explained he first glimpsed this as a young surgeon. It’s long been possible to identify certain defects in a developing fetus and surgically repair them. The surgery itself requires serious incisions, but after further development in the womb, the baby is born with no scar.

“Is this a way to unlock a human being’s inner salamander?” he wondered.

The human body’s natural regenerative powers derive from its reservoir of stem cells. These cells can differentiate into any other cell type in the body, and they can also divide and replicate themselves to keep the reservoir stocked. Throughout life, the body taps into its stock of stem cells to repair, replace, and renovate—basically, to keep the system fit for flight.

Over the years, however, the regenerative reservoir is depleted. The big question: Can we therapeutically administer stem cells to supplement the body’s natural regenerative tendencies? “The old excitement and optimism around ‘can a stem cell a day keep the doctor away’ is something that drove me into the field,” Hariri said.

So, how near are we to more proactively maintaining our bodies like one of his jets?

There’s explanatory power in analogy, but pose it to scientists specializing in nearly any field, and you’ll get a “Yes, but…” In biology and medicine, the story is especially complex. As a scientist in a still-developing field, this is something Hariri likely sympathizes with.

Stem cell medicine has been evangelized for a long time. We tend to see the endgame of a new discovery at the beginning. This is a useful catalyst for more research, but it takes years of further problem-solving between catalyst and common clinical use.

“I call this the fog of cellular medicine,” Hariri said. “There was an absence of a deep understanding of the underlying biology of stem cells. More importantly, there was absence of understanding what cell was actually going to be the one we derive into a product.”

Going from discovery to product in medicine faces a number of hurdles. Questions of source quality, scalability, cost, and regulatory standards are challenges still being solved. Stem cell therapies have also had their fair share of criticism, depending on the source of the cells. Embryonic stem cells, for instance, kicked up dust earlier this century.

But after 20 years, Hariri said, the field has come a long way.

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Today, there are a number of stem cell sources including somatic stem cells found in tissues throughout the body. Scientists have even learned to make stem cells by genetically reprogramming differentiated adult cells, such as skin or blood cells.

Hariri’s favored source lines up with that initial inspiration, the regenerative potential present in the womb. Placental stem cells, Hariri said, are great because they’re of the highest quality. Over the years stem cells in the body accumulate defects, but placental stem cells are yet incorrupt, a fresh set of instructions to reboot the system. Further, such cells are fairly easily obtained, as many people dispose of the placenta after birth.

There also appears to be regulatory progress. “Right now, most of us recognize that there are beginning to be approvals using cellular medicine to treat cancer, to treat a variety of autoimmune diseases, degenerative diseases,” Hariri said.

And unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of demand too—although, perhaps because of the field’s long promise, this demand is sometimes outpacing science. Stem cell clinics are opening worldwide, often in less-regulated environs, and this can be problematic, even dangerous.

“It’s time for the industry to be corralled and controlled in order to make sure that the products are of the highest quality and the clinical application is at the highest standards,” Hariri said.

Still, Hariri is optimistic and looking to the future. His dream is to extend cell therapies beyond the most severe diseases to more common disorders, such as diabetes, concussion, and cartilage repair. Even further out, he sees it as a way to prolong good health much further into old age—to keep our bodily machine in good nick.

It isn’t about “living forever” which strikes Hariri’s engineering brain as a rather vague notion. It’s about living a full life with the extra years modern medicine has given us.

“[If we can do it] in orthopedics, it’ll maintain a level of mobility that we’ve never seen before. If we can do it in the brain; if we can do it in the heart; if we can do it in other organ systems, I think that’s the key to living to 100 and being as active at 95 as you were at 45.”

The last few decades show progress can feel incremental as knowledge and ability catch up to dreams. But perhaps, in the years ahead, his vision will be within our grasp. Hariri said he’s launching a new company next month aimed at cellular therapy 2.0. The effort will target the more common diseases that make life less worth living as we get older.

“Our objective is we want you to die young as old as possible,” he said.

“Institutions stick around, but they change their role in our lives,” Ray explained. “They already have. The nation-state is not as profound as it was. Religion used to direct every aspect of your life, minute to minute. It’s still important in some ways, but it’s much less important, much less pervasive. [It] plays a much smaller role in most people’s lives than it did, and the same is true for governments.”

Ray continues: “We are fantastically interconnected already. Nation-states are not islands anymore. So we’re already much more of a global community. The generation growing up today really feels like world citizens much more than ever before, because they’re talking to people all over the world, and it’s not a novelty.”

I’ve previously shared my belief that national borders have become extremely porous, with ideas, people, capital, and technology rapidly flowing between nations. In decades past, your cultural identity was tied to your birthplace. In the decades ahead, your identify is more a function of many other external factors. If you love space, you’ll be connected with fellow space-cadets around the globe more than you’ll be tied to someone born next door.

During my discussion with Ray, I asked him when he expects we’ll reach “escape velocity…”

His answer? “I predict it’s likely just another 10 to 12 years before the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.”

“At that point, biotechnology is going to have taken over medicine,” Ray added. “The next decade is going to be a profound revolution.”

From there, Ray predicts that nanorobots will “basically finish the job of the immune system,” with the ability to seek and destroy cancerous cells and repair damaged organs.

As we head into this sci-fi-like future, your most important job for the next 15 years is to stay alive. “Wear your seatbelt until we get the self-driving cars going,” Ray jokes.

The implications to society will be profound. While the scarcity-minded in government will react saying, “Social Security will be destroyed,” the more abundance-minded will realize that extending a person’s productive earning life space from 65 to 75 or 85 years old would be a massive boon to GDP.

3. Technology will help us define and actualize human freedoms.

The third dangerous idea from my conversation with Ray is about how technology will enhance our humanity, not detract from it.

You may have heard critics complain that technology is making us less human and increasingly disconnected.

Ray and I share a slightly different viewpoint: that technology enables us to tap into the very essence of what it means to be human.

“I don’t think humans even have to be biological,” explained Ray. “I think humans are the species that changes who we are.”

Ray argues that this began when humans developed the earliest technologies—fire and stone tools. These tools gave people new capabilities and became extensions of our physical bodies.

At its base level, technology is the means by which we change our environment and change ourselves. This will continue, even as the technologies themselves evolve.

“People say, ‘Well, do I really want to become part machine?’ You’re not even going to notice it,” Ray says, “because it’s going to be a sensible thing to do at each point.”

Today, we take medicine to fight disease and maintain good health and would likely consider it irresponsible if someone refused to take a proven, life-saving medicine.

In the future, this will still happen—except the medicine might have nanobots that can target disease or will also improve your memory so you can recall things more easily.

And because this new medicine works so well for so many, public perception will change. Eventually, it will become the norm… as ubiquitous as penicillin and ibuprofen are today.

In this way, ingesting nanorobots, uploading your brain to the cloud, and using devices like smart contact lenses can help humans become, well, better at being human.

Ray sums it up: “We are the species that changes who we are to become smarter and more profound, more beautiful, more creative, more musical, funnier, sexier.”

Speaking of sexuality and beauty, Ray also sees technology expanding these concepts. “In virtual reality, you can be someone else. Right now, actually changing your gender in real reality is a pretty significant, profound process, but you could do it in virtual reality much more easily and you can be someone else. A couple could become each other and discover their relationship from the other’s perspective.”

In the 2030s, when Ray predicts sensor-laden nanorobots will be able to go inside the nervous system, virtual or augmented reality will become exceptionally realistic, enabling us to “be someone else and have other kinds of experiences.”

Why Dangerous Ideas Matter

Why is it so important to discuss dangerous ideas?

I often say that the day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.

By consuming and considering a steady diet of “crazy ideas,” you train yourself to think bigger and bolder, a critical requirement for making impact.

As humans, we are linearand scarcity-minded.

As entrepreneurs, we must think exponentially and abundantly.

At the end of the day, the formula for a true breakthrough is equal to “having a crazy idea” you believe in, plus the passion to pursue that idea against all naysayers and obstacles.

Join Me

Abundance Digital Online Community:I’ve created a digital/online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance Digital.

Abundance Digital is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs — those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

Around 50 million people worldwide are thought to have Alzheimer’s disease. And with rapidly aging populations in many countries, the number of sufferers is steadily rising.

We know that Alzheimer’s is caused by problems in the brain. Cells begin to lose their functions and eventually die, leading to memory loss, a decline in thinking abilities and even major personality changes. Specific regions of the brain also shrink, a process known as atrophy, causing a significant loss of brain volume. But what’s actually happening in the brain to cause this?

The main way the disease works is to disrupt communication between neurons, the specialized cells that process and transmit electrical and chemical signals between regions of the brain. This is what is responsible for the cell death in the brain—and we think its due to a build up of two types of protein, called amyloid and tau. The exact interaction between these two proteins is largely unknown, but amyloid accumulates into sticky clusters known as beta-amyloid “plaques”, while tau builds up inside dying cells as “neurofibrillary tangles”.

One of the difficulties of diagnosing Alzheimer’s is that we’ve no reliable and accurate way of measuring this protein build-up during the early stages of the disease. In fact, we can’t definitively diagnose Alzheimer’s until after the patient has died, by examining their actual brain tissue.

Another problem we have is that beta-amyloid plaques can also be found in the brains of healthy patients. This suggests the presence of the amyloid and tau proteins may not tell the whole story of the disease.

More recent research suggests chronic inflammation may play a role. Inflammation is part of the body’s defence system against disease and occurs when white blood cells release chemicals to protect the body from foreign substances. But, over a long enough period, it can also cause damage.

In the brain, tissue-damaging long-term inflammation can also be caused by a build-up of cells known as microglia. In a healthy brain, these cells engulf and destroy waste and toxins. But in Alzheimer’s patients, the microglia fail to clear away this debris, which can include toxic tau tangles or amyloid plaques. The body then activates more microglia to try to clear the waste but this in turn causes inflammation. Long-term or chronic inflammation is particularly damaging to brain cells and ultimately leads to brain cell death.

Scientists recently identified a gene called TREM2 that could be responsible for this problem. Normally TREM2 acts to guide microglia to clear beta-amyloid plaques from the brain, and to help fight inflammation within the brain. But researchers have found that the brains of patients whose TREM2 gene doesn’t work properly have a build-up of beta-amyloid plaques between neurons.

Many Alzheimer’s patients also experience problems with their heart and circulatory system. Beta-amyloid deposits in the brain arteries, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), and mini-strokes may also be at play.

These “vascular” problems can reduce blood flow in the brain even more and break down the blood-brain barrier, a structure that is critical for removing toxic waste from the brain. This can also prevent the brain from absorbing as much glucose—some studies have suggested this may actually occur before the onset of toxic proteins associated within Alzheimer’s disease within the brain.

Personalized treatment

More recently, researchers have been looking deeper into the brain, specifically at the precise connections between neurons, known as synapses. A recent study published in Nature describes a process in the cells that may contribute to the breakdown of these synaptic communications between neurons. The findings indicate that this may happen when there isn’t enough of a specific synaptic protein (known as RBFOX1).

Thanks to this kind of research, there are now many new drugs in development and in clinical trials that could target one or more of the many brain-wide changes that occur with Alzheimer’s disease. Many researchers now believe that a more personalized approach to Alzheimer’s patients is the future.

This would involve a combination of drugs tailored to target several of the problems mentioned above, much like current treatments available for cancer. The hope is that this innovative research will challenge and pioneer a new way of treating this complex disease.

Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land.

This isn’t some post-apocalyptic vision of the future à la The Terminator. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation—from seed to harvest—may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one’s fingernails dirty.

In fact, it’s science fiction already being engineered into reality. Today, robots empowered with artificial intelligence can zap weeds with preternatural precision, while autonomous tractors move with tireless efficiency across the farmland. Satellites can assess crop health from outer space, providing gobs of data to help produce the sort of business intelligence once accessible only to Fortune 500 companies.

“Precision agriculture is on the brink of a new phase of development involving smart machines that can operate by themselves, which will allow production agriculture to become significantly more efficient. Precision agriculture is becoming robotic agriculture,” said professor Simon Blackmore last year during a conference in Asia on the latest developments in robotic agriculture. Blackmore is head of engineering at Harper Adams University and head of the National Centre for Precision Farming in the UK.

It’s Blackmore’s university that recently showcased what may someday be possible. The project, dubbed Hands Free Hectare and led by researchers from Harper Adams and private industry, farmed one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of spring barley without one person ever setting foot in the field.

The team re-purposed, re-wired and roboticized farm equipment ranging from a Japanese tractor to a 25-year-old combine. Drones served as scouts to survey the operation and collect samples to help the team monitor the progress of the barley. At the end of the season, the robo farmers harvested about 4.5 tons of barley at a price tag of £200,000.

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“This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now, and we’ve done that,” said Martin Abell, mechatronics researcher for Precision Decisions, which partnered with Harper Adams, in a press release.

I, Robot Farmer

The Harper Adams experiment is the latest example of how machines are disrupting the agricultural industry. Around the same time that the Hands Free Hectare combine was harvesting barley, Deere & Company announced it would acquire a startup called Blue River Technology for a reported $305 million.

Blue River has developed a “see-and-spray” system that combines computer vision and artificial intelligence to discriminate between crops and weeds. It hits the former with fertilizer and blasts the latter with herbicides with such precision that it can eliminate 90 percent of the chemicals used in conventional agriculture.

It’s not just farmland that’s getting a helping hand from robots. A California company called Abundant Robotics, spun out of the nonprofit research institute SRI International, is developing robots capable of picking apples with vacuum-like arms that suck the fruit straight off the trees in the orchards.

“Traditional robots were designed to perform very specific tasks over and over again. But the robots that will be used in food and agricultural applications will have to be much more flexible than what we’ve seen in automotive manufacturing plants in order to deal with natural variation in food products or the outdoor environment,” Dan Harburg, an associate at venture capital firm Anterra Capital who previously worked at a Massachusetts-based startup making a robotic arm capable of grabbing fruit, told AgFunder News.

“This means ag-focused robotics startups have to design systems from the ground up, which can take time and money, and their robots have to be able to complete multiple tasks to avoid sitting on the shelf for a significant portion of the year,” he noted.

Eyes in the Sky

It will take more than an army of robotic tractors to grow a successful crop. The farm of the future will rely on drones, satellites, and other airborne instruments to provide data about their crops on the ground.

Companies like Descartes Labs, for instance, employ machine learning to analyze satellite imagery to forecast soy and corn yields. The Los Alamos, New Mexico startup collects five terabytes of data every day from multiple satellite constellations, including NASA and the European Space Agency. Combined with weather readings and other real-time inputs, Descartes Labs can predict cornfield yields with 99 percent accuracy. Its AI platform can even assess crop health from infrared readings.

The US agency DARPA recently granted Descartes Labs $1.5 million to monitor and analyze wheat yields in the Middle East and Africa. The idea is that accurate forecasts may help identify regions at risk of crop failure, which could lead to famine and political unrest. Another company called TellusLabs out of Somerville, Massachusetts also employs machine learning algorithms to predict corn and soy yields with similar accuracy from satellite imagery.

Farmers don’t have to reach orbit to get insights on their cropland. A startup in Oakland, Ceres Imaging, produces high-resolution imagery from multispectral cameras flown across fields aboard small planes. The snapshots capture the landscape at different wavelengths, identifying insights into problems like water stress, as well as providing estimates of chlorophyll and nitrogen levels. The geo-tagged images mean farmers can easily locate areas that need to be addressed.

Growing From the Inside

Even the best intelligence—whether from drones, satellites, or machine learning algorithms—will be challenged to predict the unpredictable issues posed by climate change. That’s one reason more and more companies are betting the farm on what’s called controlled environment agriculture. Today, that doesn’t just mean fancy greenhouses, but everything from warehouse-sized, automated vertical farms to grow rooms run by robots, located not in the emptiness of Kansas or Nebraska but smack dab in the middle of the main streets of America.

Proponents of these new concepts argue these high-tech indoor farms can produce much higher yields while drastically reducing water usage and synthetic inputs like fertilizer and herbicides.

Iron Ox, out of San Francisco, is developing one-acre urban greenhouses that will be operated by robots and reportedly capable of producing the equivalent of 30 acres of farmland. Powered by artificial intelligence, a team of three robots will run the entire operation of planting, nurturing, and harvesting the crops.

Vertical farming startup Plenty, also based in San Francisco, uses AI to automate its operations, and got a $200 million vote of confidence from the SoftBank Vision Fund earlier this year. The company claims its system uses only 1 percent of the water consumed in conventional agriculture while producing 350 times as much produce. Plenty is part of a new crop of urban-oriented farms, including Bowery Farming and AeroFarms.

“What I can envision is locating a larger scale indoor farm in the economically disadvantaged food desert, in order to stimulate a broader economic impact that could create jobs and generate income for that area,” said Dr. Gary Stutte, an expert in space agriculture and controlled environment agriculture, in an interview with AgFunder News. “The indoor agriculture model is adaptable to becoming an engine for economic growth and food security in both rural and urban food deserts.”

Still, the model is not without its own challenges and criticisms. Most of what these farms can produce falls into the “leafy greens” category and often comes with a premium price, which seems antithetical to the proposed mission of creating oases in the food deserts of cities. While water usage may be minimized, the electricity required to power the operation, especially the LEDs (which played a huge part in revolutionizing indoor agriculture), are not cheap.

Still, all of these advances, from robo farmers to automated greenhouses, may need to be part of a future where nearly 10 billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050. An oft-quoted statistic from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the world must boost food production by 70 percent to meet the needs of the population. Technology may not save the world, but it will help feed it.

“We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” – Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Unlike the director leads you to believe, the protagonist of Ex Machina, Andrew Garland’s 2015 masterpiece, isn’t Caleb, a young programmer tasked with evaluating machine consciousness. Rather, it’s his target Ava, a breathtaking humanoid AI with a seemingly child-like naïveté and an enigmatic mind.

Like most cerebral movies, Ex Machina leaves the conclusion up to the viewer: was Ava actually conscious? In doing so, it also cleverly avoids a thorny question that has challenged most AI-centric movies to date: what is consciousness, and can machines have it?

Hollywood producers aren’t the only people stumped. As machine intelligence barrels forward at breakneck speed—not only exceeding human performance on games such as DOTA and Go, but doing so without the need for human expertise—the question has once more entered the scientific mainstream.

Are machines on the verge of consciousness?

This week, in a review published in the prestigious journal Science, cognitive scientists Drs. Stanislas Dehaene, Hakwan Lau and Sid Kouider of the Collège de France, University of California, Los Angeles and PSL Research University, respectively, argue: not yet, but there is a clear path forward.

The reason? Consciousness is “resolutely computational,” the authors say, in that it results from specific types of information processing, made possible by the hardware of the brain.

There is no magic juice, no extra spark—in fact, an experiential component (“what is it like to be conscious?”) isn’t even necessary to implement consciousness.

If consciousness results purely from the computations within our three-pound organ, then endowing machines with a similar quality is just a matter of translating biology to code.

Much like the way current powerful machine learning techniques heavily borrow from neurobiology, the authors write, we may be able to achieve artificial consciousness by studying the structures in our own brains that generate consciousness and implementing those insights as computer algorithms.

From Brain to Bot

Without doubt, the field of AI has greatly benefited from insights into our own minds, both in form and function.

For example, deep neural networks, the architecture of algorithms that underlie AlphaGo’s breathtaking sweep against its human competitors, are loosely based on the multi-layered biological neural networks that our brain cells self-organize into.

Reinforcement learning, a type of “training” that teaches AIs to learn from millions of examples, has roots in a centuries-old technique familiar to anyone with a dog: if it moves toward the right response (or result), give a reward; otherwise ask it to try again.

In this sense, translating the architecture of human consciousness to machines seems like a no-brainer towards artificial consciousness. There’s just one big problem.

“Nobody in AI is working on building conscious machines because we just have nothing to go on. We just don’t have a clue about what to do,” said Dr. Stuart Russell, the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach in a 2015 interview with Science.

Multilayered consciousness

The hard part, long before we can consider coding machine consciousness, is figuring out what consciousness actually is.

To Dehaene and colleagues, consciousness is a multilayered construct with two “dimensions:” C1, the information readily in mind, and C2, the ability to obtain and monitor information about oneself. Both are essential to consciousness, but one can exist without the other.

Say you’re driving a car and the low fuel light comes on. Here, the perception of the fuel-tank light is C1—a mental representation that we can play with: we notice it, act upon it (refill the gas tank) and recall and speak about it at a later date (“I ran out of gas in the boonies!”).

“The first meaning we want to separate (from consciousness) is the notion of global availability,” explains Dehaene in an interview with Science. When you’re conscious of a word, your whole brain is aware of it, in a sense that you can use the information across modalities, he adds.

But C1 is not just a “mental sketchpad.” It represents an entire architecture that allows the brain to draw multiple modalities of information from our senses or from memories of related events, for example.

Unlike subconscious processing, which often relies on specific “modules” competent at a defined set of tasks, C1 is a global workspace that allows the brain to integrate information, decide on an action, and follow through until the end.

Like The Hunger Games, what we call “conscious” is whatever representation, at one point in time, wins the competition to access this mental workspace. The winners are shared among different brain computation circuits and are kept in the spotlight for the duration of decision-making to guide behavior.

Because of these features, C1 consciousness is highly stable and global—all related brain circuits are triggered, the authors explain.

For a complex machine such as an intelligent car, C1 is a first step towards addressing an impending problem, such as a low fuel light. In this example, the light itself is a type of subconscious signal: when it flashes, all of the other processes in the machine remain uninformed, and the car—even if equipped with state-of-the-art visual processing networks—passes by gas stations without hesitation.

With C1 in place, the fuel tank would alert the car computer (allowing the light to enter the car’s “conscious mind”), which in turn checks the built-in GPS to search for the next gas station.

“We think in a machine this would translate into a system that takes information out of whatever processing module it’s encapsulated in, and make it available to any of the other processing modules so they can use the information,” saysDehaene. “It’s a first sense of consciousness.”

Meta-cognition

The authors define the second facet of consciousness, C2, as “meta-cognition:” reflecting on whether you know or perceive something, or whether you just made an error (“I think I may have filled my tank at the last gas station, but I forgot to keep a receipt to make sure”). This dimension reflects the link between consciousness and sense of self.

C2 is the level of consciousness that allows you to feel more or less confident about a decision when making a choice. In computational terms, it’s an algorithm that spews out the probability that a decision (or computation) is correct, even if it’s often experienced as a “gut feeling.”

C2 also has its claws in memory and curiosity. These self-monitoring algorithms allow us to know what we know or don’t know—so-called “meta-memory,” responsible for that feeling of having something at the tip of your tongue. Monitoring what we know (or don’t know) is particularly important for children, says Dehaene.

“Young children absolutely need to monitor what they know in order to…inquire and become curious and learn more,” he explains.

The two aspects of consciousness synergize to our benefit: C1 pulls relevant information into our mental workspace (while discarding other “probable” ideas or solutions), while C2 helps with long-term reflection on whether the conscious thought led to a helpful response.

Going back to the low fuel light example, C1 allows the car to solve the problem in the moment—these algorithms globalize the information, so that the car becomes aware of the problem.

But to solve the problem, the car would need a “catalog of its cognitive abilities”—a self-awareness of what resources it has readily available, for example, a GPS map of gas stations.

“A car with this sort of self-knowledge is what we call having C2,” saysDehaene. Because the signal is globally available and because it’s being monitored in a way that the machine is looking at itself, the car would careabout the low gas light and behave like humans do—lower fuel consumption and find a gas station.

“Most present-day machine learning systems are devoid of any self-monitoring,” the authors note.

Towards conscious machines

Would a machine endowed with C1 and C2 behave as if it were conscious? Very likely: a smartcar would “know” that it’s seeing something, express confidence in it, report it to others, and find the best solutions for problems. If its self-monitoring mechanisms break down, it may also suffer “hallucinations” or even experience visual illusions similar to humans.

Thanks to C1 it would be able to use the information it has and use it flexibly, and because of C2 it would know the limit of what it knows, says Dehaene. “I think (the machine) would be conscious,” and not just merely appearing so to humans.

If you’re left with a feeling that consciousness is far more than global information sharing and self-monitoring, you’re not alone.

“Such a purely functional definition of consciousness may leave some readers unsatisfied,” the authors acknowledge.

“But we’re trying to take a radical stance, maybe simplifying the problem. Consciousness is a functional property, and when we keep adding functions to machines, at some point these properties will characterize what we mean by consciousness,” Dehaene concludes.

Evan Mawarire is a civil rights activist, pastor, and leader of the #ThisFlag movement in Zimbabwe.

Mawarire first gained considerable attention on social media following a video he posted in April 2016 that expressed his frustration with the state of the nation and Robert Mugabe’s government. In the video he encourages peaceful protest and urges people to refuse to pay bribes and stand up for their rights. In July 2016, the #ThisFlag campaign resulted in a mass movement of Zimbabweans shutting down the capital in a series of protests against corruption, poverty, and abuse of office by the Mugabe regime. Mawarire was charged with inciting public violence and “attempting to overthrow the government.” The court later threw out the charges and released him. Mawarire played a leading role in the peaceful protests which brought down Robert Mugabe in December 2017.

(Joseph) Scott Schiller is the Global Head of Customer and Market Development for HP Inc.’s 3D Printing business unit. His position has accountability for vertical market development, strategic customer engagement as well as strategic partnerships and alliances across HP’s 3D printing initiatives.

Since joining the 3D printing organization in 2014, Scott served as Business Director for the launch of Multi Jet Fusion™. Prior to that he spent eight years as part of the team that built a new business in HP focused on mass customization solutions for high volume print manufacturing. This business continues today as HP’s PageWide Press division.

Prior to joining HP, Scott had a variety of entrepreneurial and product development roles with companies such as Honeywell International Inc., Microsoft Corp. as well as leading several smaller businesses in Seattle.

Scott holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s of business administration in Technology Marketing from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle.

As the Interim CEO of SqwidNet, Phathizwe Malinga will now also be responsible for building an IoT connectivity business in South Africa in partnership with International IoT giant Sigfox.

In addition to his new role, he will continue overlooking the development of the strategy and Connected Devices Solutions divisions for SqwidNet, a fully owned subsidiary of Dark Fibre Africa. The role of leading the SqwidNet comes naturally to Malinga as he has been in various leadership roles over the years.

He is no stranger to the role of a strategist, as he consulted with both Max Healthcare and Life Healthcare Group in his previous position with the organisation. He has been involved in the information technology and telecommunication industry for over two decades, having held senior management level positions.

Before joining SqwidNet, Malinga was the Head of Application Strategy at Life Healthcare Group, and he was in charge of the IT Application strategy and Software Development for the group. Phathizwe completed his Executive MBA from the Graduate School of Business, Cape Town and he is also a Guest Lecturer with the university as well.

Tanya Knowles is the Managing Executive of Fractal Solutions, a Division of Strate (Pty) Ltd. Fractal Solutions is tasks with the research and development of disruptive technologies, including blockchain / distributed ledger technology. Strate is South Africa’s authorised Central Securities Depository providing electronic settlement of securities concluded on various stock exchange in the country. Tanya is Chair of the South African Financial Markets Blockchain Consortium representing close to 50 of the country’s largest financial institutions. She is currently completing her certification in blockchain technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a BA, PDM and MBA all from the University of the Witwatersrand. Having presented across four continents, Tanya is a well renowned speaker and thought leader in her area of expertise. In her private capacity, Tanya is involved in a number of women’s leadership and mentoring initiatives aimed at professional business women.

Known as the ‘Master of Influence’ by his clients, Gilan Gork is an internationally renowned Mentalist, Corporate Speaker, Trainer and Entertainer.

In 2016 Gilan founded the Influence Institute, where he and his team believe that everyone has ideas, products or services that deserve attention.

“We want to empower people with the ability to get the buy-in, agreement or support they need from others, so they can reach their highest success”, says Gilan.

Gilan has presented for Fortune500 companies in almost 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and America, and is the author of the bestselling book “Persuasion Games”. With two decades’ experience as a professional mentalist, Gilan creates unique learning experiences that help you unleash your influence.

He teaches how to apply a working knowledge of influence and persuasion to real-life practical situations, to be able to lead, sell, negotiate, market and inspire on a new level.

As part of Gilan’s distinctive presentation style, he interactively demonstrates a remarkable ability to decode and influence people’s thoughts. He demonstrates how through psychology you can rapidly increase your levels of trust, credibility and influence with others.

Want to work with Gilan and the Influence Institute? Drop us a mail at manager@gilangork.com.

For more information about Gilan and how he uses his experience as a Mentalist to help others learn how to positively influence outcomes visit www.gilangork.com.

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As a mentalist, I am passionate about using influence to not only entertain, but educate my clients on how they can unlock their potential and achieve their objectives faster and more effectively. The techniques I use are as accessible to anyone as the ability to breathe, all you need to do is learn how to apply them.

Nnamdi is passionate about the power of technology and innovation to change the lives of Africans. He is the International Remittance Lead for Standard Bank Group and the author of two books on African innovation -Disrupting Africa: The Rise and Rise of African InnovationandTaking On Silicon Valley: How Africa’s Innovators will change its future, both books showing how African technology and digital payments can propel Africa as a technology powerhouse on the global stage.

His many travels and business experience across the continent have greatly contributed to his huge optimism for Africa and its bright future. He features frequently as a presenter and chairperson across various conferences in Africa, contributes regularly to media houses on the subject of innovation

He has been named amongst the”100 most influential names in Africa’s telecoms, media and ICT industry”by the AfricaCom100 Research Board and more recently, been named as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent”, a MIPAD initiative, as part of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent.

Monique Giggy runs SU Ventures where she works closely with impact-focused startups that are solving world problems with technology. She and her team create programs and provide key resources that truly accelerate breakthroughs through curated networking, experience based coaching and a solid focus on metrics.

She is a seasoned value creator with proven success building/exiting companies, driving turnarounds, and leading high performing global teams. Prior to SU she conceived and helped build the world’s most popular and successful mobile golf application- Swing by Swing Golf which she sold in 2014. After the sell of her company she participated in the 2014 Global Solutions Program where she fell in love with SU.

Monique has served as an advisor and entrepreneurship coach, Venture Partner, CMO, and has started and invested in several companies.

John Sanei (Sah-nay) is an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, best-selling author and global speaker who talks about the future with a unique twist. By combining human psychology, future studies and business strategy, he guides audiences and leaders into an exponentially different future with excitement and optimism.

In What’s Your Moonshot? (his first book) he inspires the reader to ask bigger, bolder and more courageous questions about the future. In MAGNETiiZE – his second book, he invites the reader to focus on elegant, conscious and deliberate questions about the future.

John is also proudly the first African faculty member of the prestigious Singularity University in San Francisco and The Duke Corporation.

Mic believes that the future will be abundant as the power and potential of exponential technologies increase and their price gradually drop to zero, ultimately democratising numerous industries and improving the lives of all.

As co-founder of Mann Made – an award-winning experiential brand agency that has worked with top global and local Fortune 500 companies – Mic Mann has 19 years of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industry. Mic is a prolific speaker and strategist on exponential technologies, the future of work and the changing role of professionals.

After completing the Singularity University Executive Programme in 2015, he realised that in order to #futureproofAfrica we need to embrace exponential technologies. He subsequently brought the SingularityU South Africa Summit – the first of its kind on the continent – to South Africa. Mic’s passions are entrepreneurship and break-through technologies. He is also involved in the local start-up and maker community.

During the founding of the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, Danielle Strachman joined to lead the design and operations. She is the visionary behind the Thiel Summit series that has been attended by around 2 000 young entrepreneurs. Previous to her work with Peter Thiel, Danielle founded and directed Innovations Academy in San Diego, a K-8 charter school serving 350 students, with a focus on student-led, project-based learning and other alternative programmes.

Danielle is passionate about disrupting education and has worked with home schoolers, co-founded the Innovations Academy and 1517 Fund. The latter supports young entrepreneurs and technology start-ups with grant, pre-seed, and seed funding. 1517 Fund understands that not everyone is suited for higher education, hence it focuses on makers, hackers and scientists, who are interested in working outside tracked institutions. It motivates people to work on their passions, learn by doing and create new technologies.

Nastassia Arendse is the host of the Classic Business Breakfast on Classic FM, which is South Africa’s first morning business show that focuses on breaking business news, expert analysis and investment insight.

Nastassia has been working in broadcasting for eight years and has worked in television and radio. As a television anchor, she presented Closing Bell East Africa and Open Exchange on CNBC Africa.

As an experienced reporter, she covered global commodity markets for Mineweb, where she wrote articles that track changes and trends worldwide in the commodity space. The beat focused on how prospects for the global economy, interest rates and currencies influence investor decisions in relation to gold, precious metals, fixed income and equities.

In 2015, she hosted a show called Africa’s visionaries for SkyTV, which aired in the United Kingdom. She has interviewed a range of business leaders, including Barclays CEO Maria Ramos, Bidvest founder Brian Joffe, Comair CEO Erik Venter and former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano among others.

Nastassia has a passion for technology and innovative. She represents a new breed of journalists that have managed to break the professional mould and explore different avenues in the media and public sphere.

As Deloitte Africa’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Valter Adão oversees Deloitte’s Digital and Innovation portfolios. He leads a diverse team of specialists, who create a leading digital ecosystem to assist organisations in understanding and undergoing Digital Transformation, whilst uplifting their digital experiences and becoming digital at the core, in order to remain viable and competitive in a world of ever-changing digital technologies.

Valter is a corporate entrepreneur with extensive experience in building new businesses across a variety of industries. He works mostly with blue-chip clients assisting them in re-imagining their businesses or identifying high value, innovative business opportunities and rapidly commercialising them into sustainable businesses.

Valter was previously the leader and founding director of Monitor Deloitte, following Deloitte’s acquisition of the Monitor group. He is also a member of Deloitte’s Global Innovation Executive Committee.

Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In his work, Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers and artists to promote free and open societies. Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world, including: The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian, Monocle, NowThis, NPR, Quartz, TIME, WIRED, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, presented at the European Parliament and participated in Singularity University events from Berlin to Johannesburg. He has also spoken at a range of blockchain events about why bitcoin matters for freedom.

Adam Pantanowitz is a fanatical technologist, who was inspired to learn by growing up in the age of the world wide web. Since studying biomedical and electrical engineering, he has worked in the field of biotech and software. Adam is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and is chartered internationally as an engineer. He is part of the first group of faculty for Singularity University South Africa, with a focus on biotechnology.

Adam has lectured Engineering and Medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand since 2009. In academia, Adam’s innovations have resulted in a number of patents, academic papers and the creation of the media interest piece “Brainternet”, with its world-first, portable brain-internet livestream. Some of his other projects, on which he has worked alongside colleagues, include an eye-controlled wheelchair, a non-cognitive brain transmission channel that uses light and a thought-controlled robotic arm with a light-to-brain on/off switch. Their other innovations include a hands-free controlled surgery interaction system, a CPR monitoring system, a computer-based sign language interpreter and an innovative eye-controlled cursor.

He enjoys solving seemingly unsolvable problems and co-founded businesses AURA, Tariffic, Lawbuntu, among others. He also acted as CTO of VATIT, the world’s largest VAT reclaim business from 2015 until 2017.

Adam speaks around the world on the future of technology with a focus on tech-human convergence and also does motivational speaking.

Dr Taddy Blecher is CEO of the Maharishi Institute and the Imvula Empowerment Trust, CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association and former Chairperson of the South African National Government task team on entrepreneurship, education and job creation. He is a pioneer of the free tertiary education movement in South Africa and has helped establish six free-access institutions of higher learning.

Taddy co-founded the Branson School of Entrepreneurship with Sir Richard Branson and has raised over R500 million in cash, property and equity to support free access to post-secondary school education. As a result, over 17 000 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment and transitioned from living in poverty to the middle class. These formerly unemployed youth now have combined salaries in excess of R1 billion per annum and expected lifetime earnings of R27.2 billion. Over 600 000 young school-going South Africans have been reached with his one-week education and life-skills training courses.

Taddy was chosen as one of 21 Icons in South Africa, is a 2002 World Economic Forum “Global Leader of Tomorrow”​ award recipient, a 2005 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader of the World”, a Skoll Global Social Entrepreneur, who has won a $1 million prize for his work and has been honoured with two honorary doctorates. In 2009, author Tom Peters named Taddy one of his top five most influential entrepreneurs in the world over the last 30 years. Over 50 published books have profiled his work, including three recent books by Sir Richard Branson.

As a qualified actuary and management consultant, Taddy is passionate about the approach of Consciousness-Based Education, a system of education that develops the full potential of each student. This has led the Maharishi Institute to win the first prize in a global competition to find the most promising and innovative education initiative in the world.

Richard Browning is the Founder of the pioneering aeronautical innovation company called Gravity. Since its launch in March 2017, Gravity has invented, built and patented an Iron Man like flight system.

The dream was to reimagine an entirely new form of authentic human flight that leans on an elegant collaboration of the mind and body that is augmented by cutting-edge technology. Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally with video views running at more than 60 million within the first week of launch. In the first year Gravity executed 46 flight events across 16 countries including at four TED talks.

Richard and his team are delivering on the vision to build Gravity into a world-class aeronautical engineering business, that can challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if?’.

As Director of International Summits, Bohdanna Kesala’s work is to bring influencers together to cross-pollinate regional, national and global ideas that will grow into tech and social change for the betterment of all.

After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington, Bohdanna worked at Northwestern University as their Special Events Coordinator. There she met and worked with politicians, Supreme Court justices and the brightest academic minds, while witnessing the power of knowledge and change.

From there, she moved to San Francisco and received a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting from California College of Arts and an MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University. For the next decade Bohdanna concentrated on her art career. She exhibited her work in the United States and Europe, while also teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bohdanna’s paintings focused on beauty and history and how they can bring people together visually.

Merging her creativity and passion to bring people together in collaboration, Bohdanna began working for The Thiel Foundation as their Event Curator, managing all aspects of their events from high-level design to curating speakers and building partnerships between other organisations. Some highlights include: managing all events for CNBC Transforming Tomorrow: a documentary focused on the Thiel Fellowship, working with Wired.com to produce events for ‘Teen Technorati’, a web series on The Thiel Fellowship, and producing events for Breakout Labs Unboxing: a showcase of BOL’s grantees. Bohdanna was also one of the architects of The Thiel Foundation Summit, a bi-annual assembly of young entrepreneurs and visionaries from around the world.

Working directly with entrepreneurs inspired Bohdanna to open 10 Forward Events, a full-service, event-curation firm specialising in producing innovative and one-of-a-kind events for the science and tech industry, start-ups, entrepreneurs and VC firms. This endeavour ultimately brought her to Singularity University.

Rob Nail is the CEO and Associate founder of Singularity University. He brings a unique entrepreneurial and globally-focused approach to growing a non-traditional university as a platform to create a future of abundance, where exponential technologies empower us to solve global grand challenges.

Prior to Singularity University, he co-founded Velocity11 in 1999, which built automation equipment and robotics for cancer research and pharmaceutical development. After being acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2007, he traded the role of CEO to become General Manager in an attempt to be a catalyst for change at a big company. He gave that up in 2009 to go surfing and eventually find his true calling and biggest challenge yet with Singularity University. He is a director at Harman (HAR) and Light&Motion, as well as a co-founder and Director of Alite Designs. Rob is an active angel investor and advisor. He holds degrees in Mechanical, Materials Science and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of California, Davis and Stanford University.

Jeffrey Rogers is a facilitator, speaker and programme designer, who creates interactive educational experiences driven by storytelling, engagement and play. He’s an academically trained social scientist (University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas-Austin) with a knack for future-thinking and a deep belief in the transformative potential of exponential technologies as tools to de-risk experimentation, accelerate learning and create change.

Jeffrey speaks frequently across the world on exponential thinking and leads workshops on creative problem-solving and storytelling. He’s connected dots, ideas and people as a moderator recently for the Singularity University Executive Programme and Exponential Tech and Strategy programmes for Oracle, Google, Roche, NBC, Aegon among other global brands.

Prior to joining Singularity University, Jeffrey spent a decade building learning and development solutions across sectors and designing and delivering award-winning educational and training programmes. He currently serves as Singularity University’s Director of Faculty and Facilitator Development. Jeffrey works closely with the faculty to help individuals discover their unique strengths as communicators and teachers, and to co-create rave-worthy, learner-centred experiences online and at Singularity University.

As co-founder and CEO of Mann Made – an award-winning, experiential brand agency for top local and global Fortune 500 companies – Shayne Mann has 17 years’ of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industries. Over the decades he has successfully driven Mann Made to become a 65-employee strong company that specialises in activations, events, media products and productions, as well as mobile and telecoms.

Shayne is a SingularityU alumnus and was also the co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa. He epitomises exponential leadership and is passionate about how exponential and disruptive technologies can drive change to positively impact South Africa and the continent.

Shayne is passionate about the drivers of entrepreneurship and is involved in the local start-up and maker communities. He has partnered with the Maharishi University of Management, Taddy Blecher and The Ubuntu Foundation. In partnership with an international private equity investor, he has invested in a variety of industries including property, medicine, music, media, and tech, alongside his brother Mic. His personal passions include cycling, meditation and leading a healthy lifestyle and creating a positive impact in the country through all he does.

Nathana O’Brien Sharma is the Program Director for Faculty Affairs at Singularity University. She’s also faculty in Law, Policy, Ethics and Blockchain, where she writes and speaks on the impact of accelerating technologies and the future of law and governance to audiences of technologists and business leaders. Nathana is a principal at Crypto-Lotus, a cryptocurrency hedge fund and is an Advisory Board Member for the Creative Destruction Labs in Toronto, the leading academic startup accelerator in North America which supports companies in specialized technology tracks including machine learning and quantum machine learning.

Nathana is an International Association of Privacy Professionals certified privacy expert in both the US and the EU and advises companies on navigating complex cross-border privacy issues, particularly in connection with the use of emerging technologies. Nathana was previously a technology transactions associate at Gunderson Dettmer, where she advised high growth VC backed startups and venture funds on a range of technology and business issues. Nathana is a JD/MBA graduate of the Yale Law School and Yale School of Management.

Nathana was a lead researcher at MetaMed, a VC backed medical research start up and has a background in the lab in immunology and neuroscience. She is also a graduate of Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program.

Anita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai; one of the 10 most innovative artificial intelligence startups in 2017 according to Fast Company. Iris.ai is an AI Science assistant, able to read, digest and connect scientific knowledge, that will grow up to be the world’s first AI Researcher within a decade.

Set out to democratize access to science, Iris.ai can reduce R&D departments’ time to map out existing research by 95% and remove current requirements of having deep domain expertise involved in the process, thus allowing more people to solve more difficult problems.

Anita is a highly sought after public speaker, one of Inspiring Fifty Nordic’s most inspiring women in tech, twice TEDx speaker and 500 startups, SU Global Grand Challenges Awards and TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alumni. Anita is also the first Norwegian to attend Singularity University’s Global Solution Program in 2015 – and she put on the first Global Impact Challenge Norway in 2016.

Anita has never had what she refers to as “a real job” and Iris.ai is her fourth own startup. The past 10 years of her career have spanned over 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, getting 30 (mainly middle-age, male) engineers to dance to ABBA in front of their co-workers, facilitating solar light business creation in Kenya, being in the centre of several startups crashing and burning, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry. She also dropped by 6 universities on the way. And built a race car.

Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina has been Executive Manager at South African Cities Network since 2011. She previously worked with National Treasury, the CSIR, HSRC, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Advanced Policy Institute. Dr. Geci holds Masters degrees in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA, and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand.

Her interests span a range of development foresight, policy, planning and practice topics, particularly relating to urban governance, the built environment and innovation systems. She has two decades’ experience working and publishing in these fields. She recently published the book Innovation Africa (Emerald Books, 2016).

Dr. Geci is a Council Member on the South African Council of Planners, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand School of Governance, and an Research Associate of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI) and the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chairon Innovation and Development.

She is also a founding director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, co-founder of ForesightForDevelopment.org, an Associate Editor for the African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development (Taylor & Francis), and Africa Regional Editor forForesight: The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy (Emerald).

Fred Swaniker is deeply passionate about Africa and believes that the key missing ingredient on the continent is good leadership. This belief led him to launch the African Leadership Group, which aims to groom 3 million leaders for Africa by 2035. Prior to launching his entrepreneurial pursuits, Swaniker worked at McKinsey & Company in South Africa.

Swaniker has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was listed by Forbes Magazine among the top ten young ‘power men’ in Africa. Fred has an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top 10% of each graduating class. He holds a BA in Economics with a minor in Mathematical Statistics from Macalester College (magna cum laude). He was born in Ghana but has lived and worked in about 10 different African countries.

Jamie Wheal is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of Flow states. He has advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, the athletes of RedBull, and the owners of NFL, NBA, MLB and Premier League teams, to the executives of Google, Deloitte Cisco and Young Presidents’ Organization. He studied historical anthropology under MacArthur Fellow Patricia Nelson Limerick, specializing in utopian social movements and his work has appeared in anthologies and peer-reviewed academic journals.

Wheal co-authored Stealing Fire; a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

Jamie Wheal is Partner at Fulcrum Advisors and Executive Directive of Flow Genome Project, an international trans-disciplinary organization dedicated to reverse-engineering the genome of Flow, or the peak performance state, by 2020.

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, futurist, and award-winning author. Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence.

Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Ramez is also the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (non-fiction), which looks at the environmental and natural resource challenges of climate change, energy, water, and food, and charts a course to meet those challenges by investing in the scientific and technological innovation needed to overcome them, and by changing our policies to encourage both conservation and critical innovations.

He’s a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy at Aurora Illinois. In his leisure, Ramez has climbed mountains, descended into icy crevasses, chased sharks through their native domain, backpacked through remote corners of China, and ridden his bicycle down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast. He lives in Seattle, where he writes and speaks full time.

Nathaniel Calhoun helps guide Singularity University’s approach to changemaking and impact as a founding member and Vice Chair of its Global Grand Challenge Faculty. He has moderated numerous SU Executive Programs and Directed SU’s flagship impact program, the Global Solutions Program (GSP).

Nathaniel closely tracks innovations in emerging decentralized and platform cooperative technologies that create brand new business models and opportunities. He tracks disruptive and precedent setting changes within policy, especially related to governance and civic technologies. He specializes in helping both private and public sector actors to understand how to leverage and prepare for the growth of these and related trends, offering a unique take on the options facing an aspiring “exponential organization.”

Nathaniel also supervises the creation and implementation of digital technologies at a global scale that help alleviate poverty while increasing business literacy along with digital and financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. He does this work through CODE Innovation, a consulting company he founded in 2009 to help organizations like UNICEF and Plan International to use web and mobile technologies more effectively. Code Innovation has received financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to further develop their Self Help Group digital platform, which is growing exponentially in nine languages and more than a dozen countries.

Nathaniel has two decades of experience in the field of education, public speaking, moderation and resilience building. He tracks the threat of technological unemployment and the relative merits of the solutions that humanity is offering around this issue. After living and working in Africa for more than a decade, Nathaniel enjoys helping organizations to think through their strategies with new and emerging markets.

Nathaniel is available for a variety of customized speaking and consulting packages. A sampling of keynote presentations is described below. Talks below can be given in 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 minute varieties. Prices vary depending on industry, location, duration and special requests.

Professor Mark Post first got involved in a Dutch government-funded programme investigating “in vitro meat” in 2008, when he was a professor of tissue engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The programme had been initiated by Wilem van Eelen, an 86-year-old entrepreneur who held a long-time fascination for the possibility of culturing meat.When the director of the programme fell ill, about mid-way through the programme, Post took over supervision of the PhD students. Motivated by the potentially high societal impact, he continued research even after the funding had ended in 2010.

Renewed funding by a private partner enabled the realisation of a project to create a processed meat product using muscle cells from a cow.Professor Post received his medical degree from the University of Utrecht in 1982 and trained for a PhD in Pulmonary Pharmacology, graduating from the University of Utrecht in 1989.He joined the KNAW Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands before being appointed full-time Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA in 1996. Five years later, he moved with his lab to Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, and was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine and of Physiology.

In July 2002, Dr. Post returned to the Netherlands as a Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Technical University Eindhoven. Since January 2004 he has been Chair of Physiology at Maastricht University.

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Jody is the Director of Design for SU Labs, where she provides design and innovation direction for corporate, startup and field impact teams. She employs a radical approach to Human Centered Design to create exponential solutions to the world’s toughest problems. She also speaks about Augmented and Virtual Reality for SU.

In her 23-year design career, Jody has created just about everything from holograms to physical products and R&D. Today, she is Director of Design for Singularity University Labs, where she incubates solutions to Global Grand Challenges using exponential technologies. She specializes in the avant garde of technology, covering everything from Artificial Intelligence to Robotics. She’s spent the last 9 years on AR/VR, most notably as Principal Experience Designer on the HoloLens Project at Microsoft and Principal UX at LEAP Motion. She has traveled the world, speaking about the future of these technologies and their impact on the world for groups like WIRED, Google, and TEDx. Previously, she co-founded and directed Kicker Studio, a design consultancy specializing in Natural User Interface, Perceptual Computing, and R&D for companies including Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, and DARPA.

Jody is also a practicing artist with an MFA in Painting and Design & Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute. She’s a collaborator with the art crew Five Ton Crane, and in her spare time, makes her own clothes while building robots and rockets.

Jason co-founded Made In Space in 2010 as a result of analyzing the best possible approaches to enabling a fully sustainable form of space colonization.

With a core focus on space manufacturing, the company has since built, flown, and operated the first and second 3D printers in space. Installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the first Made In Space Zero Gravity 3D printer began space manufacturing in November 2014. Today, Made In Space operates the second generation 3D printer on the ISS, called the Additive Manufacturing Facility, enabling groups across the planet to have hardware manufactured in space.

Additionally, Made In Space is working with NASA in the development of the Archinaut program to enable in space robotic manufacturing and assembly of large space structures. In 2016, Made In Space announced the first space mission to manufacture goods in space for use on Earth; an exotic optical fiber expected to have 100 times lower attenuation than traditional silica fiber when produced in the weightlessness of space.

Jason holds a B.S. and M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Central Florida, has studied at the Singularity University Graduate Summer Program, and is an internationally recognized speaker on the topics of space exploration, advanced manufacturing, and the theory of disruption.

He serves on the University of Central Florida College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean’s Advisory Board, the Advisory Council to the Waypaver Foundation, the Technical Advisory Board for Space For Humanity, and on the Board of Directors for the Future Space Leaders Foundation. In 2014, Forbes recognized Jason on the prestigious 30 under 30 list.

Stacey Ferreira is an Arizona native who co-founded her first company, a single sign on company called MySocialCloud, when she graduated from high school. She attracted investors like Sir Richard Branson, Jerry Murdock and Alex Welch through Twitter who invested $1.2M in the business when she was just 18 years old.

In 2013, Stacey sold MySocialCloud.com to Reputation.com and went on to publish her first best-selling book called 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers & Changing the World.

Stacey is currently the CEO of Forge, an enterprise workforce management software that empowers hourly employees to work on-demand while providing retailers the tools needed to source, hire, manage and retain their workforces.

In addition to her entrepreneurial work, Ferreira was selected as one of twenty Thiel Fellows selected for the 2015 Thiel Fellowship and is a US State Department Speaker who has given speeches about entrepreneurship in Russia, Egypt, Cameroon and the Central African Republic to name a few.

John Hagel III has nearly 35 years of experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, and has helped companies improve their performance by effectively applying new generations of technology to reshape business strategies. John currently serves as co-chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, which conducts original research into emerging business opportunities that should be on the CEO agenda. In recent years, the Center for the Edge has established branches in Melbourne, Australia and in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and author. Prior to that, he held significant positions at leading consulting firms and companies. From 1984 to 2000, he was a principal at McKinsey & Co., where he was a leader of the Strategy Practice. In addition, he founded and led McKinsey Electronic Commerce Practice from 1993 to 2000. John has also served as senior vice president of strategic planning at Atari, Inc., and earlier in his career, worked at Boston Consulting Group.

He is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is the author of a series of best-selling business books, including his most recent book, The Power of Pull and, earlier, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, Net Worth and Net Gain. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and professional service firms.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively.

His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage.

He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies longevity escape velocity.

Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Tiffany Vora is an educator, writer, research scientist, and entrepreneur who is excited to bring her diversity of experience to Singularity University as Principal Faculty in Medicine and Digital Biology.

After earning undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry at New York University, Tiffany worked on cutting-edge drug-discovery technologies at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Her PhD research in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, which was funded through NASA, brought her into the emerging fields of genomics, systems biology, and computational biology. It was during this time that Tiffany developed an interest in the cultural shifts that accompany new technologies and new ways of thinking. She translated this interest into a global perspective by joining the American University of Cairo as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where she spearheaded curriculum development for core classes in scientific thinking as well as computational biology classes for non-programmers.

Upon her return to the United States, Tiffany founded Bayana Science, an editing, writing, and consulting company dedicated to excellence in science communication. Tiffany also served as an instructor for the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She has contributed to literally thousands of grant proposals, research articles, presentations, textbooks, and other works spanning medicine, computer science, applied physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, and the life sciences; her biology expertise encompasses fields as diverse as the microbiome, ancient molecules, biophysics, environmental monitoring, tissue engineering, biohacking, and the quantitative analysis of large biological datasets.

Tiffany loves encountering the natural world through hiking and scuba diving. She travels extensively with her family, seeking out new experiences and cultures. She enjoys sharing her passions through teaching, writing, and public speaking.

David Roberts is regarded as one of the world top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. His passion is to help transform the lives of a billion suffering people in the world through disruptive innovation.

David served as Vice President of Singularity University and two-time Director (and alum) of the Graduate Studies Program. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and medals and has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station.

Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley Business schools have all written and taught case studies on David leadership, management, and decision making. He has been featured on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and in USA Today, Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, Business Week, CNN, and dozens of others. His startups have received many awards to include Internet World Net Rising Stars,Red Herring Catch, top 50 Private Companies in the World, Red Herring Top100 Private Companies in the World, USA Today Tech Reviews Best Picks, Internet Outlook Investors Choice Award, Enterprise Outlook Investors Choice, Best of the Web from PC World, and Apple Computer Premier Systems Integrator Award.

His fascination with technology began In fourth grade after building a hovering electric drone, to carry his younger sister to the bus stop, powered by what was formerly his mother’s vacuum cleaner, and fortunately limited by the length of an electric power cord.